The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for data object generation and matching, a computer readable storage medium for storing a program for performing the method of data object generation and matching, and a business method which makes use of the method and apparatus.
More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for data object generation and matching wherein users of different types employ a common classification system to categorize an activity or entity to create a data object corresponding to the respective activity or entity, it then is possible to automatically match compatible activities or entities on the basis of the created data objects corresponding thereto.
In a modern free market economy goods and services are traded on a daily basis in accordance with the rules of supply and demand. However, the successful operation of such an economy ultimately relies upon either the vendor of the goods or services, whatever these may be, being able to locate a vendee whose requirements substantially match those provided by the goods and services on offer from the vendor, or vice versa. As will be apparent, this is an age old business problem inherent to any economy based upon free trade.
A particularly complicated free-market sector is that of the provision of labour services, and the efficient matching of the labour services of any particular individual to any particular job or employment position. Indeed, the specific problems posed by the most appropriate matching of the right personnel to the right job are so extensive that in recent years there has been extensive growth in the Human Resources (HR) industry, both within traditional employers expanding their HR departments, and within the third-party agency sector. The numerous disadvantages and cost for both employers and employees of using third-party agency services, however, mean that it is preferable for most positions to be filled by direct contact between the employer and the potential employee. This route, however, suffers from the general problem referred to above of how to bring together the right person and the right job.
The traditional method of finding the most appropriate person for a job usually involves the employer advertising the job in a publication such as a newspaper or trade journal. Potential employees then contact the employer to arrange an interview, at which the potential employee""s suitability for the job is assessed by the employer and a decision is made as to whether or not to offer the potential employee the advertised job. In such circumstances, the employer acts as a job provider, and the potential employee as a job seeker, and these terms will be used hereafter to refer to such parties. In this traditional method, the publication such as the newspaper or trade journal acts as the medium by which the job provider and job seeker are initially brought together and contact is first made.
Advances in communications technology in recent years have led to the rise of new media by which job providers and job seekers may make a first initial contact. In particular, the growth of the Internet, and in particular the World Wide Web has led to a new communication media providing access to millions of people worldwide, and it is therefore unsurprising that this new medium has already been adapted to address the issue of recruitment. Various Internet based recruitment systems already exist.
The first generation of on-line systems specifically aimed at the recruitment problem merely mirrored the format of traditional newspaper or trade journal jobs pages, providing lists of job adverts from job providers in the form of electronic bulletin boards or web pages.
In order to find a suitable job on such a first generation system, a job seeker would have to potentially review many hundreds of adverts, and interpret each advert regarding the specific job advertised. Such systems place a large burden on the job seeker when in use to both search through and analyse each advert to find any that may match their requirements.
Following the first generation system, second generation on-line recruitment services are also known which provide rudimentary search facilities akin to those provided by Internet search engines. These facilities allow a job seeker to search through job adverts posted on a particular site on the basis of keywords entered by the job seeker to determine the existence of those keywords in any of the posted adverts. Such searching techniques are standard Internet search tools, and will be well known to both the man skilled in the art and the lay reader familiar with Internet use.
Second generation systems improve upon the first generation systems by allowing the job seeker to narrow down the number of adverts for review. However, there is still a need for an on-line system which allows for a more refined search to be performed in order to further reduce the burden on the job seeker and/or job provider.
Although the above background has been presented in relation to the problems of the recruitment and labour market, it will be appreciated that similar problems exist in general throughout every sector of a free market economy, in that a vendor of goods and services must be able to locate a suitable vendee (or vice versa) with coincidental needs which substantially match the attributes of the goods or services provided by the vendor. It will be further appreciated that similar problems to those described above exist for both the vendor and vendee.
The present invention addresses the problem of matching coincidental needs relating to an activity or entity by the provision of a classification system specific to the particular activity or entity to be traded or exchanged which allows parties to the trade to define their requirements in a standardised format. Once the parties requirements have been placed in the standardised format, it then becomes possible to automatically match the coincidental requirements by machine, thereby bringing together the parties to the trade or exchange in a time efficient and cost effective manner.
From a first aspect, the present invention provides a method of data object generation and matching using a database having data fields for storing a plurality of predefined classification categories, each of said categories containing one or more predefined user-selectable attributes, said method comprising the steps of
pre-storing one or more data objects of a first type in the database, each of said data objects storing one or more pre-selected attributes of one or more of said plurality of classification categories;
displaying said plurality of classification categories to a user for selection of one or more attributes from at least one of said classification categories;
storing the selected attributes in a database in the form of a data object of a second type;
comparing the stored attributes of the data object of the second type with the stored pre-selected attributes of a data object of the first type; and
matching said data objects of the respective types which have at least a predetermined number of common stored attributes.
Preferably, the pre-stored data objects of the first type are created by displaying the plurality of classification categories to a user of a first type for selection of one or more attributes from at least one of the classification categories, and then storing the selected attributes in the database in the form of a data object of a first type. In such a case, the attributes selected and stored as a data object of the second type are selected by a user of the second type.
The classification categories may be divided into two or more sub-classes, and the correlation between the attributes of the sub-class compared when matching data objects. Each sub-class may be assigned a different acceptability threshold, with the data objects being matched only when the number of common attributes in each sub-class exceeds the threshold set for that class. As a result, classification categories can be group generally according to their importance, with a first sub-class requiring the highest level commonality, say 100%, with second and further sub-classes allowing for a lower level of correlation.
In a preferred embodiment, the classification categories and attributes are displayed to the users of either the first or second type by transmitting the plurality of classification categories in the form of web pages over the Internet for display using a web browser, which users of the first or second types then use to select the required attributes in each required classification category, the web browser then sending the user""s attribute selection over the Internet in the form of data generated by the web browser to be stored as data objects of the first or second type as appropriate in the database.
In another preferred embodiment, the user-selected attributes are stored in the database in the form of pointers to a look up table containing the attribute name and/or description, and the comparison of the stored attributes of the stored data objects is performed on the basis of numerical comparison of the pointers. This has the advantage that database memory is maximized and the comparison is performed in a computationally efficient manner.
From another aspect, the present invention also provides an apparatus arranged to perform data object generation and matching, comprising:
database means for storing a database having data fields corresponding to a plurality of predefined classification categories, each of said categories containing one or more predefined user selectable attributes, said database pre-storing one or more data objects of a first type, each of said data objects storing one or more pre-selected attributes of one or more of said plurality of classification categories;
means for displaying said plurality of classification categories to a user for selection of one or more attributes from at least one of said classification categories;
database management means, said database management means further comprising:
database writing means for writing the user selected attributes in a database in the form of a data object of a second type;
attribute comparison means for comparing the stored attributes of the data object of the second type with the stored pre-selected attributes of the data objects of the first type; and
data object matching means for matching data objects of respective types which have at least a predetermined number of common stored attributes.
Preferably, the data objects of the first type are generated and stored by users of a first type, and the data objects of the second type are generated and stored by users of a second type.
The classification categories may be divided into two or more sub-classes, and the data object matching means may match each sub-class individually. Each sub-class may be assigned a different acceptability threshold, with the data object matching means matching data objects when the number of common attributes in each sub-class exceeds the threshold set for that class, and preventing a match if the correlation between any one of the sub-class is below that sub-class threshold. As a result, classification categories can be group generally according to their importance, with a first sub-class requiring 100% commonality, with second and further sub-classes allowing for a lower level of correlation.
In a particularly preferred embodiment, said means for displaying the plurality of classification categories to a user preferably comprise means for transmitting said plurality of classification categories to users of the first or second types in the form of web pages over the Internet for display using a web browser, and means for receiving the user""s attribute selections over the Internet in the form of data generated by the web browser. In such an embodiment, the users of the first or second types use the web browser to select the required attributes in each classification category.
Preferably, the database means stores the data objects in the database in the form of pointers into a look up table containing the attribute name and/or description, the attribute comparison means then comparing the attributes of each stored data object on the basis of the pointers stored in the data base as a numerical comparison.
From a yet further aspect, the present invention also provides a computer-readable storage medium for storing a data object generation and matching program for use with a database having data fields corresponding to a plurality of predefined classification categories, each of said categories containing one or more predefined user-selectable attributes, the program being further arranged to control the steps of:
pre-storing one or more data objects of a first type in the database, each of said data objects storing one or more pre-selected attributes of one or more of said plurality of classification categories;
displaying said plurality of classification categories to a user for selection of one or more attributes from at least one of said classification categories;
storing the selected attributes in the database in the form of a data object of a second type;
comparing the stored attributes of the data object of the second type with the stored pre-selected attributes of the data objects of the first type; and
matching data objects of respective types which have at least a predetermined number of common stored attributes.
It is a feature of the present invention that the generated data objects represent an abstraction of the activity or entity to which they relate in accordance with the selected attributes of the various predefined classification categories. The predefined classification categories and predefined user selectable attributes are therefore preferably application specific, that is the chosen categories and attributes contained therein are specific to the particular activity or entity which is to be classified using the classification categories. Using the same classification categories to abstract the respective requirements of users allows objective matching of the users requirements by machine.
In a particularly preferred embodiment relating to the recruitment market, the classification system comprises a plurality of pre-defined classification categories relating to job activities and features, the attributes then being descriptive of qualitative values which may attach to the categories. For example, classification categories relating to the recruitment market may be such categories as, for example, xe2x80x9cjob categoryxe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9cgradexe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9cdress codexe2x80x9d, etc, etc, whereas attributes relating to, for example, the xe2x80x9cgradexe2x80x9d category may be, for example, xe2x80x9cjuniorxe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9cintermediatexe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9cseniorxe2x80x9d etc et al.
Furthermore, in the particularly preferred embodiment referred to above, the user of the first type is preferably a job-provider and the data object of the first type is preferably a profile of a job on offer in terms of appropriate selected attributes from the classification categories which qualitatively and/or quantitatively relate to the activities involved in the job. Moreover, in the embodiment the user of the second type is preferably a job seeker, and the data object of the second type is preferably a profile of the job seeker in terms of appropriate selected attributes from the classification which qualitatively and/or quantitatively relate to the skills, background, and/or further requirements of the job seeker.
The present invention has the primary advantage that it enables simple machine matching using a database of coincidental requirements of two users each of a different type.
The present invention has a further advantage, that by the use of the same classification system by users of both types to abstract their respective requirements then the users of one type are provided with a clear and consistent description of the goods or services on offer from the user of the opposite type.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method of objectively comparing the requirements of a first user and a second user, the method comprising the steps of:
(a) providing a classification system having a plurality of classification categories, each category having one or more pre-defined attributes;
(b) displaying each of the categories to a plurality of users;
(c) obtaining information regarding each user""s preferred attributes;
(d) storing that information;
(e) comparing the stored information and matching two users if the correlation between the selected attributes exceeds a predetermined threshold.
In a preferred embodiment, the users are of a first or primary type, such a job providers, or a second or subsidiary type, such as job seekers. The classification system may be presented in the form of an Internet page or the like and contain a template which can be readily adapted by the job provider to suit their specific requirements. The method may also include the step of testing the user of, say, the second type, and only matching users of respective types if the attribute correlation is above the predetermined threshold and the user of the second type performs satisfactorily in the testing procedure. As with the classification template, the or each test may be provided in a form that is readily adaptable by the user of the first type to suit their specific requirements.